Tuesday, May 03, 2016

Spiritus Mundi

Ace Commenter Brian pointed us to a very long piece in New York magazine from Andrew Sullivan, concerning the rise of Trump and its larger meaning. There's more to the essay than I can tackle this morning; as is usually the case with Sullivan, it alternates between brilliance and incoherence. A pull quote to get us started:

The deeper, long-term reasons for today’s rage are not hard to find, although many of us elites have shamefully found ourselves able to ignore them. The jobs available to the working class no longer contain the kind of craftsmanship or satisfaction or meaning that can take the sting out of their low and stagnant wages. The once-familiar avenues for socialization — the church, the union hall, the VFW — have become less vibrant and social isolation more common. Global economic forces have pummeled blue-collar workers more relentlessly than almost any other segment of society, forcing them to compete against hundreds of millions of equally skilled workers throughout the planet. No one asked them in the 1990s if this was the future they wanted. And the impact has been more brutal than many economists predicted. No wonder suicide and mortality rates among the white working poor are spiking dramatically.

All true. And more:

Much of the newly energized left has come to see the white working class not as allies but primarily as bigots, misogynists, racists, and homophobes, thereby condemning those often at the near-bottom rung of the economy to the bottom rung of the culture as well. A struggling white man in the heartland is now told to “check his privilege” by students at Ivy League colleges. Even if you agree that the privilege exists, it’s hard not to empathize with the object of this disdain. These working-class communities, already alienated, hear — how can they not? — the glib and easy dismissals of “white straight men” as the ultimate source of all our woes. They smell the condescension and the broad generalizations about them — all of which would be repellent if directed at racial minorities — and see themselves, in [Eric] Hoffer’s words, “disinherited and injured by an unjust order of things.”

Sullivan is getting to what Charles Murray has been writing about recently, the idea that our elites live in a bubble and have little interest in understanding the concerns of those who don't travel in the same circles. And yet, and yet...

But elites still matter in a democracy. They matter not because they are democracy’s enemy but because they provide the critical ingredient to save democracy from itself. The political Establishment may be battered and demoralized, deferential to the algorithms of the web and to the monosyllables of a gifted demagogue, but this is not the time to give up on America’s near-unique and stabilizing blend of democracy and elite responsibility. The country has endured far harsher times than the present without succumbing to rank demagoguery; it avoided the fascism that destroyed Europe; it has channeled extraordinary outpourings of democratic energy into constitutional order. It seems shocking to argue that we need elites in this democratic age — especially with vast inequalities of wealth and elite failures all around us. But we need them precisely to protect this precious democracy from its own destabilizing excesses.

How, precisely, would the elites do this? We're at a dangerous place because, I think, the elites have been dining on the seed corn. And if the economy starts to go south this year, and there is strong reason to believe it is already happening, it could be an ugly year.

A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

11 comments:

Who are "the elites", really? I'm not at all convinced anyone has a solid answer to that question. (I'm not even certain you and Andrew are referring to the same people, here.)

By a lot of folks' definitions, *I'm* elite: (mostly) liberal-voting, PhD-having, knowledge economy-employed, two-income childless (by choice) household-having eater of arugula. I also rent a house two blocks away from section 8 housing, drive an eight-year-old Mazda, and don't even have a dishwasher in my house. Am I elite? (Maybe I'm elite and cheap and I just don't mind washing dishes by hand that much.)

Clearly there's more to elite-ness than money: Donald Trump being the loudest and most orange Exhibit A.

I think it is safe to say Barack Obama is elite now. I also think it is safe to say he didn't start that way. When did he get his elite card punched? When he became president? When he won his first election? When he got into Harvard?

I honestly don't know.

So on one hand, I (think I) agree with you that Sully's point (his thesis, apparently) about "elites" being a necessary check on the tendencies of democracy towards excess, populism, and ultimately tyranny is...a bit incoherent. But maybe that's because I'm not entirely sure who, exactly, he is talking about.

Couldn't one argue that Trump is a member of the elite? As is Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton? This cycle has been the strangest one I have seen, but there is no doubting in my mind that Trump could be the man who has positioned himself right. One could reasonably argue that the men the elites have pushed into 1600 Penn since Reagan have been questionable choices at best.

I think we're actually pretty close. Sullivan would apparently consider himself elite and he's certainly a nationally known figure, if not exactly a household name. But will anyone who doesn't already read his stuff care what he thinks? He quotes Hoffer at great length, but he has to understand he's (to use Hoffer's formulation) a man of words, not a man of action. Trump is, without question, a man of action.

As an aside, you may, to a certain extent, travel in elite circles, but when I think of the elite, you ain't it. So you don't have any obligation to check the populism of Trump supporters, unless you feel like it.

Victor Davis Hanson has a piece out today that touches on some of the same issues. I'll probably use that as a jumping off point for a future post.

Yes -- all of the candidates on offer are part of the elite in one form or another. I would also agree with your point about positioning, but I'm not sure we hold the elites culpable for choices that we all had a chance to affect.

Regarding Obama and being elite, what about when he moved in with his grandparents, a bank VP and a furniture store manager, and enrolled at Punahou?

Along those same lines, we might define "elite" as "having wealth or connections in the family that give you opportunities others don't think possible." Things like going to an elite school like Punahou or Harvard, and things like, well, going into politics.

Not quite sure what's been lost today. Certainly the elites of the past had problems relating (Haymarket Square riots) to the less fortunate, but also were major benefactors of the less fortunate( Grant Park). We might debate whether the degree of "noblesse oblige" has changed, or whether they've got a better or worse feel for the needs of the poor, but all in all it's not THAT different.

Maybe what's changed is the way the rest of us see the rear view mirror. Back in the Gilded age, the poor & middle class looked back and saw slavery, Cossacks, and the like. Today, they look back and see their parents with good jobs and low debt.

Maybe what's changed is the way the rest of us see the rear view mirror. Back in the Gilded age, the poor & middle class looked back and saw slavery, Cossacks, and the like. Today, they look back and see their parents with good jobs and low debt.

What, one wonders, could be more impossible than suddenly vetting every single visitor to the U.S. for traces of Islamic belief? What could be more make-believe than a big, beautiful wall stretching across the entire Mexican border, paid for by the Mexican government? What could be more credulous than arguing that we could pay off our national debt through a global trade war?

Umm, healing the oceans? Universal health care that is less expensive?